North Bend teens abandon selective targeting, get arrested
As anybody who has been in high school can attest, there is a certain sense of satisfaction that can only come from vehicular pranks. It is almost a rite of passage for teenagers - experiencing for the first time that freedom behind the wheel - to take the pranks that define a young man's existence and bring them inside an automobile. In the precious few years where you're old enough to drive but not yet an adult in the eyes of the court, when you understand the world but that world stops at the county line, everything from water balloon wars to a night of urban catcalling seems to be fair game.
But any veteran thrill seeker will tell you the first rule of success is to exercise discretion. Unfortunately for four young men from Mt. Si High School who left home without the slightest bit of creativity or common sense, that lesson was learned the hard way.
The Times has the details: the four students were in an SUV cruising North Bend (a sleepy town nestled beneath the mountains east of Seattle, known best as the setting for David Lynch's cult television classic Twin Peaks) armed with pellet guns. After a pair of 15-year-old girls got off a school bus, the shooters chased them with guns blazing to the front steps of one girl's home.
Unfortunately for them, they had messed with the wrong 15 year old.
Parked outside the home was a State Patrol car and inside was the girl's father, a state trooper and former Navy Seal. Upon hearing the distraught girls' story, he leapt into his patrol car and followed the boys as they sped away, troopers said.Oops.
The trooper stopped the boys on a dead-end road near Rattlesnake Lake, pulled his gun and took them into custody, according to the Patrol. All of the boys have criminal records, the Patrol said. The girls, also students at Mount Si, had minor injuries.
UPDATE: Well, the Times article is a bit misleading. According to this document at the Mt. Si High School website, the shooters were using Airsoft guns that shot plastic BBs, not traditional air guns that shoot lead pellets. The document also claims that there was no prior relationship between the shooters and the victims.
